ART IN REVIEW; Sam Samore

By GRACE GLUECK

Published: December 2, 2005

Made from the stuff of film dramas and documentaries, Sam Samore's four ''collaged narrative'' stills take the form of long, narrow strips, each containing images that hint at the possibility of stories but do not tell them. The strips are paired: in the most dreamlike two, a man and a woman are slumped over a table (are they dead?); a beautiful but catatonic young woman is adorned with a necklace by a mysterious female figure behind her; a blown-up, out-of-scale eyelid with lashes appears next to the face of a sleeping woman; and a passage of vivid, unstructured color play occurs in fiery red and black.

The other pair has cooler ingredients: a woman applying eye makeup in a mirror, an animated woman's face behind bars, a stretch of mountaintop against an angry sky, the shadowy form of an eagle (or is it a hawk?) in flight. But the mystery of their seemingly random placement seems like stale Surrealism, an empty game that presents a meaningless challenge to the viewer. GRACE GLUECK